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When I wrote my last article on putting together and Old School/New School stick, I mentioned that it would be interesting to try one. Mission accomplished, and the new gut string can be seen in the header image. It’s not obvious at first glance, so you may have to squint. But there it is, twisted around the top of the lacing from side to side, course, slightly translucent. Read More…

Although I played in goal, I always had a small stick to throw around with, usually with my good buddy, Ed. My first stick was a middie stick cut to attack length. Meh — not a very good stick. Later, with this example of mediocrity as my guide, I chose a really beautiful attack stick from the lot my coach brought back from the East. Somewhere along the line, I lost it.

Now, don’t think I’m going to roll over for all of today’s lacrosse equipment: I haven’t got to pads yet. BUT … my new Reebok 7Ks are incredibly better than my trusty old Brines! (Yes, that’s italic and an exclamation point in that last sentence.) I mean, big-time better.

As folks have noticed the sparkling new hickory shaft on my goalie stick, I have been made aware of a great variety of opinion about such shafts. So, perhaps it would be good to delve a bit deeper than I did a couple of blogs ago. Here are seven things I read about wooden shafts online, and what I think about them.

In a couple of professional incarnations, I worked in marketing departments as a writer, including at Starbucks. I had the experience there — sometimes exhilerating, most times frustrating — of working on product names. One of the bits of lingual jui-jitsu that often needed to be performed was making the negative positive. You know, “it’s not a flaw, it’s a feature”. As I shopped for a goalie stick head, I had a moment of empathy for my erstwhile colleagues whose job it is to name goalie sticks and heads.

So how did a guy who hasn’t been around lacrosse for years choose the Nemesis over other heads on the market? Easy, just the way most people probably do. I read a lot of reviews online. I liked what folks said about the stiffness of the head in terms of scooping of the remains of stopped shots. What was said about the sloping sidewalls funneling shots into the pocket was also an influence. Keep Reading…

If you read my bio, you know I’m a designer. During my lacrosse deep-freeze, that’s what I did, and that’s what I taught. When you work with as many designs as I have, you learn to look at stuff and know right away that they will work well — or not so well. The first time I saw a pic of today’s goalies holding their modern sticks with rounded plastic heads, I knew that the sticks would work much better than the sticks I used. Keep Reading…

For my money, the best way to coach a young goalie is to stand behind the net and see what he’s seeing. That’s what I did working with the 7‐8 goalies of the North Seattle Lacrosse Club. As a result, I got pelted a couple of times. No big deal, but it occurred to me that, eventually, one of the young attackmen would get around to beaning me with an errant shot, with unknown results. I went shopping for a helmet. Keep Reading…